We've established that the traditional view of HR and hiring as an administrative function is narrow and seriously flawed. It effectively throttles what is potentially the most powerful engine in your organization, and that is the ability to hire great people.

There's another view that's mistakenly narrow. It's that the candidate experience primarily involves the job application on a website. Although it does involve that, it's so much more, and it deserves your close attention.

In order to become great at the hiring experience, you first have to define its wider boundaries. The experience starts when people become aware that your organization exists—in other words, your brand. Then they apply for a job, and hear (or don't hear) the results. Then hopefully they get an interview, then an offer, and they accept.

But it does not stop there. We consider the candidate experience to go beyond acceptance to their first day on the job, and then through onboarding—that critical first 30 days or so, when a decision to join is either validated or doubt is seeded. There are easily several dozen touch points in the candidate experience, whether organizations realize it or not and engineer those touch points or not. That means dozens of opportunities to impress or to drop the ball and pay for it with your reputation and hiring ability. This chapter is about making those experiences as good as possible, both for candidates and for the people involved in hiring them.

Top Talent

We assume that you're not reading this book so you can become “sort of okay” at hiring. You want to become head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest great at hiring, correct? If the answer is yes, then that means you are pursuing talent that is also superior.

Here's the problem with that great talent: It's much more in demand than other talent. These people are almost the opposite of average talent. Let's assume for a moment that a run-of-the-mill decent candidate needs to apply to 10 jobs in order to get an offer from at least one of them. The most sought-after candidates may get 5 or 10 offers and decide to take one. They can choose to work for any organization in their field, anywhere in the world, at any time.

You may decide that you want to roll out the red carpet for this special talent, but that's no longer possible. In the days when companies controlled what information was released about them, the red-carpet treatment may have worked. But now in the time it takes to eat a ham sandwich, the talented person can get a full data dump about you from Glassdoor, and corroborate that information with other social media, plus connections garnered from LinkedIn.

You're no longer in control—at least not in the way that your predecessors were in the good old days. Now the only way you can be in control of your reputation is to think about the hiring experience and make it so good that perfect strangers will interview with you and write you glowing reviews, even if they don't get the job. If you become that good, then yes, you'll be able to attract amazing talent at will.

“But the numbers prove I'm in the driver's seat, because I always have many more candidates than I have openings.”

Let's look at those numbers. When you talk about hiring, you're mostly talking about people you're not hiring. In other words, you have 45 job applicants and you choose one, leaving 44 people who can—and a few percent of them will—light you up on social media and on Glassdoor. All these places are informing the decision of that next star candidate you so badly desire.

In an interview, these top candidates are looking you over with a critical eye the same way you're looking them over. You scrape up as many dollars as you can from everywhere and plop it before the star candidate—your great offer. What they know and you do not is that another organization with a lot more money and fame than you have decided to slide across a piece of paper with an eye-opening number on it.

Okay, so you lost that one. But let it be a lesson to you to focus relentlessly on the candidate experience and on your hiring brand, as rated by people over whom you have only the control that comes when you impress them from all angles.

What Are You Posting?

Many organizations do not make a clear distinction between three documents: The job description is the internal document that outlines the responsibilities, requirements, expectations, pay, and so forth; the job post lists the open role on an organization's website, with enough information and enticement to appeal to talented people so they decide to submit their information; and a job ad is a placement on an external site like Indeed.com or ZipRecruiter, meant to get people to click through. They often do not take the time to customize these documents to fit the audience.

The first problem is with the content of the posting. It's usually paragraph after paragraph of dense, bullet-point language and meaningless jargon. Trash, really. Many of the requirements range from unnecessary to absurd. We've seen examples where the number of years of required experience is longer than the technology has been in existence—for example, relating to Bitcoin.

We think someone who has great information about rewriting job posts is Katrina Kibben from Three Ears Media.¹ She has lots of useful advice on the topic. Here are a few of her points:

• Most job posts do a poor job with the job title, yet that's exactly the field that is searched by just about everyone. Because there are no industry standards around job titles, it's worth aligning the title with the most searched-for variations of that job. There may be a huge difference in results if you title a job “Data Scientist” versus “Data Analyst.” Do some Google Trends searches and see if one variation is much more popular than the rest.
• Don't just mention a skill like “Java.” Instead, translate the skill into everyday activities that the job will involve. Describe what they'll be using Java to create. Even include sentences that start with “After one year, you'll know you were successful if…”.
• See where you can shorten the job post; 200 words is a good length to shoot for. Stick to what is essential for the candidate to do the job, and don't put in a lot of stuff if you're not sure what is important.

The second problem is that the job description—if done well—has a purpose inside the organization, but what potential applicants should see is a job post that reads more like an advertisement. It should be accurate but also compelling. The goal is to make the target competitive candidate sit up, take notice, and be convinced to apply.

The third issue is that almost no one customizes or split-tests these documents. If we hope to get an internal applicant for a job, then the post on the internal careers page should sound different, with perhaps some internal jargon or a different title. If the post will also be advertised on campuses or specialized boards, think about doing other versions of the same post but with language that's tailored to those narrower audiences.

Strategic organizations will split-test posts to see if particular headlines pull differently. They'll also test different descriptions to see if they attract different kinds of applicants.

What Are You Mapping?

A lot of organizations spend considerable time mapping out their customer journey. In fact, there is a whole conference circuit for people interested in learning the intricacies of customer journey mapping. We're not aware of any conferences whatsoever on the topic of hiring experience mapping.

Quietly though, the best organizations at hiring are doing just that. In Chapter 2, we mentioned how Airbnb leaves welcome notes for candidates being interviewed. We suggest that you map all your interactions with people during the hiring process and see where you can similarly stand out. You should have little trouble enhancing your brand and thus distinguishing yourself from the competition.

Mutual Pain

If you ask most recruiters, “Tell me about the worst day in the history of your recruiting career,” you are most likely to hear about an event they worked. It's not much better for the potential applicants either.

It's a combination of overload and poor technology. If you're the recruiter, you may have collected 200 résumés after spending hours on your feet. You then flop down in your hotel room, go through the résumés, and try to remember whom you liked and didn't like. Then you scramble to try to set up interviews the next day with the people you think you liked. You may even need to type their résumés into your system. Often, recruiters will know that they are successful at hiring people recently out of school, but they won't know if it was from the recruiting effort there or from receiving applications in other ways.

It's all a process that hasn't changed in decades. When we ask recruiters why they go to these campuses if they're not sure how many candidates they get, and how many have actually turned into hires, the answer is shockingly consistent: “We go to the campuses because one of the execs at our company went there and insists that we go.”

If you're the potential applicant, it's not much better. For the most part you're either asked to enter your information manually, or you hand your résumé to the recruiter and probably hear nothing back.

If you recruit at such events, at the very least it will be important to take any manual process out of the applicants' side. If you're handed a résumé, then have an app (ours or someone else's) where you can scan in the résumé, and take notes. Even a smartphone scanner will be better than the manual process. Or you could ask them to email their résumé to you on the spot, and if possible, you can take a few notes about the person between conversations.

Multiple Cooks in this Kitchen

There's another way that you have less control than you may think you have. Your reputation is the sum total of not just your efforts, but also the efforts of multiple people throughout your organization.

Who wrote the emails that automatically get sent to applicants? We should back up: Have you ever seen the emails that go from your organization to applicants? If you have, because you wrote them, then maybe they're great. But it could be that someone with zero recruiting experience wrote those, and you may be surprised—not in the good sense of the word—to learn what they say. Those emails are one of the first impressions made on applicants.

Is the language dull and bureaucratic sounding, full of stuff like “Your application has been received and is being processed,” as if they're a bag of bolts? Or does it make your brand proud? We don't mean to suggest that these emails should gush enthusiasm, only that your brand should be stronger and not weaker after someone reads your emails.

If this person has already applied for jobs at your company, does the email sound like the business has never met the applicant before?

Let's say things are moving to the next stage and you've contacted an applicant and invited them in for an interview. It's likely that you are personally doing none of that, but that someone with a title of coordinator or the equivalent is doing that work.

Pretty senior people in organizations are often surprised to realize that pretty junior people are responsible for multiple important touch points in the hiring experience. They are usually paid near the bottom of the scale, but will be scheduling interviews, and possibly getting on the phone with candidates if some details require it. They become the voice and brand of your organization.

Perhaps you have a great coordinator who's been effectively trained at making that good first impression, someone who is friendly and welcoming, and who has a good command of all the sorts of questions that might be asked at that stage. Perhaps you don't have such a person. Do you know who does it? Have you checked what's being said? Does an FAQ-type document exist with the answers you want candidates to hear when they ask various general, beforehand questions about the interview and the organization?

Information Candidates Can Use

Conscientious candidates typically will be geared up for interviews and can get nervous about the prospect of how the interview will play out. What are you doing to distinguish your brand at this point? Here are some of the questions candidates want to know about the interview, and which you should provide via email before the interview:

If the interview is in person:

• What is the exact address?
• Where do I park?
• Will I be reimbursed for any expenses like a ride, parking, and the like?
• If there are multiple similar buildings and entrances, how do I get to the right one? (Send a photo of the door with a big arrow.)
• What should I wear?
• What should I bring?
• Who will be interviewing me?
• How long will it last and is there a hard stop at a certain time?
• In addition to meeting people, is there any other component, like testing?
• Where are the restrooms?
• If I may need some water or food for whatever reason, where do I find that?
• Before I show up, do you have the number for someone I can text if for some reason I need to? For example, if there's a traffic jam due to an accident, or I have to cancel at the last minute?

If the interview is remote:

• Will it be by audio only or video?
• What is the phone number for me to call if I don't want to use my computer audio?
• Who will be interviewing me?
• How long will it last and is there a hard stop at a certain time?
• In addition to meeting people, is there any other component, like testing?
• If it's a long series of conversations or tasks, roughly when will we have breaks?
• What is the number for someone I can text if for some reason my computer freezes or I'm bumped off the call?
• Where is the documentation for the remote tool we'll be using (whether it's Zoom, Skype, etc.)?
• Where is the link to make it easy to test audio and video. For example, Zoom has a test feature for doing just that at https://zoom.us/test.
• Will the session be recorded, and will I later have access to the recording?

Names Are Important

It's often an awkward moment for everyone if a candidate has a name that may be unusual for native English speakers to pronounce. Candidates want to fit in and have a smooth experience, and they may be unsure if they should correct the pronunciation when someone makes a mistake. On the other hand, interviewers don't want to mess up and don't necessarily want to create an awkward situation by dwelling on a name too much. Do they not use the name? Or guess at the right way to say it? Or just ask?

The way we handle this issue at Greenhouse is we ask candidates to record and send us a short audio clip where we hear them pronouncing their own name. Then everyone interviewing has the spelling and sound of the name, before the interview even starts. You don't need Greenhouse software to make this happen. Most smartphones can do voice memos and those can then be sent via email or text. We highly recommend that you add this to the information you send to candidates before an interview. It shows respect, and almost no one does it.

Meet and Greet

Of course, remote working makes things different, but if the interview is in person, make sure you internally choreograph some of the first impressions: Who will greet the candidate? Will it be a receptionist, the coordinator, hiring manager, or someone else? And how can you help that person make the best first impression?

Where will the interview happen, and is that the best place? Of the options available to you, which ones would impress, which would be neutral, and which may even detract from the interview experience?

Does someone leave the candidate alone in the room, or stay and chat until everyone shows up?

Speaking of showing up, what do we know about whether interviews start on time and who is late by how much, or is known to be a no-show? You don't improve what you don't measure.

Is the seating arrangement something that's pleasant and effective, or might it make the candidate uneasy? For example, it might feel like an inquisition to have a row of interviewers on one end of the table and the candidate way at the other end. It might also be awkward if the candidate must constantly swivel their head in order to make eye contact with people on the far right and left.

Does anyone offer the candidate a beverage?

From the organization's perspective, you bring someone in for three hours of interviews. But from the candidate's perspective, it's also a three-hour taste of what it's like to work here. Do you have a culture where people will say “Hi” in the elevator or cafeteria to someone wearing a visitor badge? What would your first impressions be at your office? The goal here is to be observant and intentional.

During the Interview

We'll get into the actual substance of the interview in Chapter 7. At the moment, we're focusing on the experience instead of the substance of questions.

Will the candidate look at the interviewers and others they meet today and feel like they belong here?

Does someone have an agenda written out (physically or online, depending on the interview) and is it reviewed at the beginning of the interview?

We talked in Chapter 1 about the wealth of insights that can come from recording interviews. If you listened to a recording of interviews, does someone interrupt the candidate regularly? Does everyone give the candidate the time to provide complete answers? Sure, some people go on way too long when they could give a succinct answer. In that case, is anyone trained in skillfully moving the conversation along so the questions get covered in the time allowed?

Do the interviewers give the candidate a chance to ask questions? Or is that relegated to the last minute or two, when people are packing up and the interview feels like it's already over?

Does someone let the candidate know what the next steps will be without first being asked?

Some organizations will give out swag like a T-shirt before or after an interview. Do you have something like this? If done well, it can feel like a nice gesture; almost like “You're part of our community.”

After the Interview

It's a nice touch when candidates send thank-you notes after an interview. Why not send the candidates a thank-you note? How many candidates will have ever gotten such a note?

Someone described to the candidate in the interview a timeline for what happens next. What data do you have for whether, in fact, that timeline was reasonably accurate? Of course situations arise, but if on a regular basis there's a wide gap between expectations and reality, something should change. Either tell future candidates about the realistic timeline, or determine if there's a problem with delays and whether that problem can be fixed.

If it's been determined that you'll not be progressing with the candidate, then when do you break the news? As we said earlier, it's bad form to do so while the candidate is still leaving the building. (True story.) We recommend that you send that email at least one day later.

It's also very bad form to ghost candidates. That sometimes happens with good intentions: “I'll put this sticky note right over here next to the others, reminding me to send a ‘sorry to inform you’ note…” and then the note gets lost in a sea of stickies. Get a better system, even if it's just a dedicated calendar in Gmail to remind someone to send the notes at the right time. This helps to take stress off recruiters, who don't need to be mentally carrying around these sorts of tasks.

Speaking of that note, do you know what it says? Is it anything better and warmer than “We regret to inform you” language? We may be on to other things by that point, but a rejection letter is a sensitive thing for recipients. It's not necessary to lie, but it's a nice touch to make it sound—if appropriate—that you enjoyed meeting them, were impressed by something, and you wish things had worked out differently.

If some candidates get a second round of interviews, then how is that news delivered? Preferably it's with some enthusiasm, and also it should come from someone whom the candidate met. It should feel like a step up from the strangers we were before the first interview.

Of course, depending on the nature of the second interview, there should be another set of instructions about what's different. It may explain, “You'll be meeting with [so and so], who was on business in Europe when you came in for your first interview. We'll also be in a different building.…” Also explain if the topics will be significantly different, or if other interview elements will be added, like testing.

Important Information for the Asking

Once again, there's conventional thinking, and there's the kind of thinking that contributes to hiring excellence. If you ask conventional thinkers how they measure the candidate experience, they may say, “We look at Glassdoor.” As you know, we think Glassdoor is vital for everyone to review. However, it is often the case that only a small percentage of all candidates will do a review on Glassdoor.

Forward-thinking companies gather further useful information through the use of a survey in addition to monitoring Glassdoor. We've found that around 20 percent of the surveys get filled out—a much higher response rate, giving us that much more data. And get this:

You should also survey the candidates who didn't get the job.

That may be shocking to some people, but by now you already know the reason why—there are so many more of them than there are candidates who are offered a job. Also, they can have valuable observations about the process they just went through.

Here's how we do it. We wait until candidates have left the process, whether that's because they weren't accepted, they were made an offer and declined, or they were hired. Our approach is to send it two weeks after the candidate left the process.

We have a five-point scale from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.” Here are some of the statements we'll ask them to rate us on:

1. Overall, my interviewing experience was positive.
2. My interview(s) started on time.
3. The position was clearly explained to me.
4. The people who interviewed me were well-prepared and conducted the interviews skillfully.
5. The interviewers got an accurate sense of my strengths and weaknesses.
6. I was treated with courtesy and respect.
7. Overall, I found the interview process to be challenging.
8. Overall, I have a more positive impression of the company after having gone through their recruiting process.

We also give the ability to make a comment about any of the questions and responses, in addition to the opportunity to tell us if there's anything they wish the company had done differently.

When the surveys come in, we anonymize them, so no one can associate survey feedback to any specific candidate or job. The aggregate information and stats then go to senior people at the department level.

If you're interested in being in the group that operates at a Systematic or Strategic level (and if you're reading this book, you should be), then you will find this continuous flow of information to be vital as a basis for continuous improvement.

Onboarding

Many companies think of new hire onboarding as the logistics of getting people a desk and a computer. Yes it's that, but it should be a great deal more than that.

Onboarding should be about how a candidate becomes part of the community as an employee. It should be how they learn the real culture and philosophy of the company. During the interview phase, we may have established that a candidate will be able to do a particular job. During the onboarding phase, we show that person how to do that job, and how to begin to navigate the company norms.

Of course, the coronavirus made this whole process that much harder. It used to be that you could sit near teammates or a designated buddy, and you'd learn a lot of the unwritten stuff by osmosis. That's just logistically harder when teams work remotely. Given how many organizations have said that they're not returning to the pre-2020 office arrangement and substantial numbers of employees will continue to work remotely, this onboarding challenge is with us to stay.

Just how important is it for us all to get onboarding right? Consider this:

• 20 percent of employee turnover happens in the first 45 days.²
• The cost to find and onboard a replacement is up to nine months of salary.
• 69 percent of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three or more years if they experienced great onboarding.

Let's look more closely at the current situation at most organizations.

The Hiring Experience Is Not Just About Candidates

When we talk about the hiring experience, we're not only referring to applicants, candidates, and new hires. There's a whole other dimension, which is the experience that the rest of your employees have when they interact with recruiting. It's the internal experience.

That experience has a different feedback loop from the new-hire one, which tends to be about Glassdoor ratings. Let's say you ask the hiring manager to show up and participate in an interview. If that is an awful experience from the hiring manager's perspective, then one of three things will happen: They may not show up (“Hey, I'm sorry; we had an emergency.”), or they'll be incredibly hard to book a time with, or they may show up and now do a poor job themselves. They might ask irrelevant, duplicative, or downright illegal questions, or be bored. That certainly will make it to the external ratings as well.

What are some of the issues that relate to the hiring manager?

1. The process feels like a black hole, where no useful information escapes and makes it to the hiring manager. They feel like they're forever chasing the recruiter. As extremely busy as recruiters are, they need to find even small amounts of time to play offense instead of only defense. One way is to give hiring managers good-looking, high-quality data and reports before being asked to.

   The hiring manager may feel like there is no forum to express what's needed in this role, and how the candidates are stacking up. This gets to the crucial step of having an effective kickoff meeting. We'll discuss this in Chapter 7. Also make sure the hiring manager is able to express what they think about this person versus that person. That may seem like an obvious requirement, but hiring managers sometimes feel left out when decisions get made about the candidate pool.

2. Repetitive tasks are more cumbersome than necessary. For example, if documents like job descriptions, résumés, and scorecards are stored in different places and have different filename conventions (or no standardization at all), then each of these touch points instead becomes a pain point for the hiring manager. Even if your systems are not highly automated, standard procedures can be put in place to make documents easier to find. Sometimes hiring managers are part of the problem by contributing to poor document practices. In that case, it's time to get together and come to some agreement about what the procedures should be, and how a lot of time will be saved and frustration avoided by taking these steps.
3. Tools and processes don't adjust to different levels of hiring manager engagement. Some hiring managers are more active and involved than others. Some are too active, and their “I'll do it myself” attitude can break systems. Don't have a one-size-fits-all approach. Ultimately, a lot of the recommendations in this book will result in a higher level of hiring manager involvement. In the meantime, it's best to adjust to each manager's comfort zone for tools. If some managers live in their mobile phones or in Slack, then do what you can to fit within their lifestyle. It will pay off.

If you are this kind of great service provider inside the organization, they're going to think: Wow. Recruiting's really on its game. I need to make sure I step up and do my part, too. I don't want to be the one who slows things down.